The Aesthetic Experience

3 Pages 739 Words

With so much emphasis placed on the departments whose degrees can produce huge sums of money, it seems that we have begun to lose the “arts” aspect of the liberal arts college, or sector of the university. So much in fact that there are people that I know that haven’t even stepped foot in the Fine Arts Center, let alone go to a performance that isn’t mandated for their class. I would think that it is fair to say that I’m not exactly one of these people as everyone in my family has been or is an artist, including my brother who graduated with a degree in ecology and now is a potter. It is also true that I went to a school that emphasized the arts, and not so much testing, so much in fact that I had never had homework until I transferred to a public school in the sixth grade. Yet I have tried to remove myself from the arts as I didn’t want to get caught up in the family characteristic, and become just a “statistic”, just another Kaufmann who is an artist.
So although I am familiar to various forms of art, I lacked the knowledge of basic terms to describe that form and therefore the mental capacity to describe what I am seeing or hearing, as well as to interpret the meaning of it. This is the foundation behind the entire thinking or concept of the aesthetic experience of the lively arts – that one needs adequate information in order to be fully enveloped in the piece, and being able to experience a connection to it. This feeling might be that a person becomes almost a part of the piece as though they were the focal point of it, just because they connect with it in a special way that can be from a past experience, memory, or a current feeling that they are experiencing. This can be transcribed through either creative or receptive experience, but in this class we dealt solely with the latter.
An aspect of this class that really stood out to me was the Japanese gardens that we went to see. Previous to taking thi...